{ there are no montagues and capulets }
More emo, more single parenting, more Peter stumbling around in a field...
Title: On the Other Side of Morning, 2/?
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Mohinder/Peter (eventually)
Spoilers: Everything leading up to 1x23
Summary: Life goes on for those left behind, and begins again for those thought lost.
Fast approaching monsters
Marching in a row;
Grab what slips your mind
And what your memory will not hold
-- Queens of the Stone Age, River in the Road
--
It was somewhat distressing to realize they had been living in the new apartment for nearly two weeks, and he’d still barely unpacked.
The datum spilled out across the top of his work desk, a thick stack of manila file folders with hastily scribbled names, dates and classification across the raised tabs in his own illegible chicken scratch. New specimen to be alphabetized, catalogued, recorded; new samples to be tested. Names and data to be added to the now fabled - and steadily growing - list.
Standing before his half-filled file shelf, Mohinder stared at the work before him, sighed, and carded a hand through his hair.
Sunshine filtered through the bedroom window in thin white slits of clean light. It defines the new map on the far left wall in narrow bands, highlighting the crisscross of colored twine and thumbtacks, metal pins catching in a tiny flourish of brass and daylight. His equipment sat below on the adjacent desk; in the boxes he’d remembered Molly carefully labeling science stuff in orange marker when she was helping him pack up the old apartment. It was still largely untouched, even after two weeks, the seal of clear tape across the cardboard flaps broken but its contents tucked safely inside.
Most of his things were still boxed up, for that matter. The remnants of life in the apartment in Brooklyn, and his last in Chennai, sent to New York after he’d called his mother and Nirand to arrange to have the last of his things shipped. His mother had not been utterly enthused, and understandably so, with the notion that her only son would be living in America permanently, but she understood his responsibilities, his obligations there. Beyond the research that claimed her husband before him; obligations to Molly, and others still as well.
And so his things had stayed. Discarded in columns of boxes in the bedroom and hallway, left in favor of unloading all of Molly’s things into her brightly painted bedroom across the hallway instead, arranging and rearranging furniture until she was contented. The fact that in the two months spent in his care Molly had somehow - although he knew very well the how, he just didn’t feel the need to admit that he had become biologically incapable saying “No” to an eight-year-old and meaning it - managed to acquire more possessions than Mohinder was certain he’d ever owned didn’t make this process any easier.
He sorted in silence. Samples, profiles, figures and notations; put away with their proper specimen dossiers. Divided into two stacks on the desktop, “processed” and “unprocessed.” Watching the latter column grow, Mohinder sighed again.
It wasn’t as though he didn’t have help. Molly insisted on doing what she could, whenever she could, as children often do. Sometimes she watched him work, reminding him when he’d been working too long - and he should probably eat, because he had to be hungry by now, sounding more like the parent than should have otherwise been allowed - as her small fingers skimmed along the cool wood of his chair back, data scrolling endlessly past the computer monitors in a language she didn’t understand.
Other times, when he was sufficiently distracted, she stole into his room to stand and stare at the map, frowning in concentration at the names written on post-it notes and photos fixed by pins attached to various localities. It made Mohinder nervous when he first saw her do this, watching her brow furrow as she stood on her tiptoes to pluck particular thumbtacks from their places and rearrange them how she saw, and knew, fit. Wanting to keep his work preserved as it stood, their world as he had come to understand it, but more so than that it was the still-fluttering need he felt to keep her as far removed from the list - and the dangers that came with it - as he could manage.
“This one’s here,” she chirped contentedly, and pointed to a thumbtack she placed over Atlanta. “And these,” two pins, from Hanover and Aberdeen to Budapest and Dundee, “they go here now.” And watching him stare dumbly at his adjusted map, she had only giggled.
The phone rang from its cradle on the bedside table at his back. Mohinder turned by degrees on the second electronic chime to eye it distractedly from over his shoulder. Didn’t step towards it, not yet, just waited for the machine to get it.
People rarely called the new apartment, because no one was really supposed to. He’d taken steps to ensure that. The address and number were unlisted; he’d given them to his mother and no else since moving in. The only phone number he had given out since was to his cellular, and strictly to his concise list of associates, contacts and the administrative offices at Molly’s elementary school, in case of emergency.
But as cautious as he had been, that didn’t mean that it still couldn’t be found if sought after long enough. And wanted badly enough.
The click of the machine, digital tape rolling. “Dr. Suresh.” Female voice, demure, unassuming, which as experience tells him, tends to be treacherous. “I’m contacting you at the request of an associate of the Petrelli family - ”
Turning he took two swift steps towards the machine. Questions and accusations fresh on the tip of his tongue, wanting to know the how and the why this person had found his number, when his cell phone went off on the desk behind him with a chirp and a rattle. Reached for it, “one new text message” blinking across the small display in a white menu window, and beneath it the name “Parkman.” Mohinder swallowed tightly, giving the answering machine a distrustful glance as he snapped his cellular shut again.
He would have to deal with that - whatever it was - later. He had an appointment to keep, after all.
--
Time passed, marked in the heat of sunlight passing over his skin.
How long he was unsure of, under the ringing in his ears and the hum of pained extremities still circling his brain. He felt…bruised, somehow, inside and outside. Skin sensitized, nerves twitching with a tired fire over each pull of joint, and in reply to every thread of cotton fiber rubbing against it from beneath his clothes. Sore, as though he’d been hurt from the fall - fall from what? shouldn’t he have healed? - but not the explosion. If the explosion had even happened yet, his recollection trapped beneath the fog.
None of the possibilities that ran along the wrinkles in his thoughts made any sense: falling, exploding, dying and not. The only thing he knew for sure was that there was nothing else here. No people, no dwellings, no roads or telephone lines. Only a flat expanse of short crinkly green pasture; grazing stock interspersing small patches of dirt and sun-browned grass and the sparse trees that crowded the small upgraded hills that enclosed the wide level prairie.
Tucking the wayward fringe of his bangs behind his ear, he got to his feet to face the dry wind. Staring up at the sky, his thoughts drifted towards flying: simply taking off from wherever this was, and going back to the city. To New York: to Claire, Nathan, to everyone.
But in what direction -- from what direction? How long would it take, and did anyone even know he’d gone?
Beyond the field was chicken-wire fence, grassland narrowing into a dirt road that ran a path between the trees for what looked like miles and miles. Where it could end he hadn’t the faintest clue, but it was what had made sense. It had to make sense.
Roads meant people, or at least Peter hoped they did.
--
“Hey.” A casual nod, hands in coat pockets, the exchanges of men who aren’t quite friends. “You look like hell.”
Snow settled on the outstretched arms of the barren trees that lined the horizon against the towering city, and on the ground in perfect, rolling sheets of soft and white. Back home it would’ve been mild, a little rainy perhaps but warm; nothing at all like a New England winter, with the wind and the ice and the snowflakes that stuck damply in his hair and to his clothes and never seemed to come out no matter how much he fussed with them. Mohinder’s fingers ached with the cold, the joints of gloved hands tense as he slid them into the pockets of his coat for warmth with a limp shrug and nod of his head.
“Hell is relative, I find. And there are always worse things to look like,” he replied, dry sort of smile edging at the corner of his mouth. “Matt.”
“Well I guess your sense of humor still works.”
The park is largely abandoned this time of day, in this kind of weather. The shovel-cleared jogging paths that intersected the white-blanketed ground were empty of activity and signs of use, save their tightly bundled forms as they walked along beside one other, soggy tracks left behind in freshly fallen powder. It was safer to meet out in the open, as they’d settled on some time ago, reassured if only by degrees. Phone lines could be tracked, buildings bugged, cars followed and private conversations overheard by eavesdroppers with the intent and the means to follow them. Here at least they had the illusion of privacy, for what it was still worth.
The last time Mohinder checked they were still considered wanted men, at least in some circles. Perhaps two months had been long enough to ease their guards but it wasn’t a risk he felt inclined to take anymore.
“Still off the reservation, I take it?” he asked, over the wet sound of boot heels tracking in muddy slush.
Matt shrugged. “Yeah, well, it’s amazing how fast the FBI warms up to you again when you get shot chasing serial killers that they can’t seem to find. Audrey says it’s like glorified consulting; not like an officially recognized job or anything, but at least somebody’s got a use for this, I guess.” He gestured towards his temple.
“That’s not what I meant, Parkman.” Something like humor, however perverse, sharpened in Mohinder’s eyes. “An unexplained explosion in a textiles factory on the Arizona-Mexico border? It made the news, you know; Molly followed the coverage for days.”
Matt gave him a sheepish sort of side-glance. “Yeah, well. What the FBI doesn’t know…”
Mohinder only nodded. He couldn’t say for sure that he wouldn’t put his own inward proclivity towards acts of vengeance to the same uses if he were in the other man’s position. And gods knew that Parkman and Bennet were certainy justified in doing so, out of all of them.
“Molly sends her regards,” he said instead. “She wanted to come with me but I told her skipping classes was out of the question, even under the circumstances. She wasn’t especially pleased about it, but…”
Of course she’d firmly reminded him that morning on the way to school to tell Parkman that she’d said hello. And that she was doing well, and she was sorry she couldn’t see him, and to tell him the ten other things that Mohinder hadn’t had a chance to make note of as she rattled them off excitedly in the passenger seat beside him.
“Sorry I won’t get a chance to stop by and say hi myself, I won’t be in the city that long this time,” Matt replied. “It’s not exactly a social visit.”
“Of course not.” Mohinder sighed, tightened gloved fingers as he watched the sunlight fade behind a rolling column of gray-edged clouds. From the inside pocket of his coat he produced the printed sheet of paper and passed it to the man at his side. “This is what she could establish of his whereabouts as of this morning,” he explained, as Matt examined the notations on the reproduced atlas print.
“Molly said she wasn’t able to get a lock on his location for the past several weeks; she believes he was moving too swiftly, perhaps in travel. These coordinates haven’t changed in the past twenty-four hours, so I believe he’s taken up root, at least for the moment. From what we’ve learned of the Taylor and Mendez murders, he tends to stay at the victims’ homes for a few days afterwards, but if you move quickly enough perhaps you can locate him before he moves on.”
Matt nodded pensively, as though memorizing the points of the printout in his hands. “This is good,” he replied, “this is really good. I’ll get this to Audrey tonight, see if she can get some people over there. Catch this bastard once and for all.”
Matt slid it into his coat pocket; Mohinder looked towards the city behind them with a tightness gathering in his stomach.
“This is wrong, Parkman, isn’t it?” Mohinder asked, out of his mouth before he had time to process the question for himself. “Molly is a child. She should be concerned with going to school, playing with dolls -- not helping you and I chase after murderers.”
Matt nodded, spared him a sympathetic look and casual nudge against the shoulder. Not quite friends, indeed, Mohinder surmised despite himself. “It’s not right, but we don’t get a choice about that. And you’re doing everything you can to help her, keep her safe - that’s something, man. She’s lucky to have you.”
The corners of his mouth tilted. “I think it’s me who’s been lucky to have her,” Mohinder replies, and doesn’t have to feign the look of warmth that takes his features. “After everything that’s happened, I don’t think I would know what to do without her now…”
He dropped his eyes to the ground, fondness slipping from his expression. “It’s been on the news again you know.”
A sigh, thin, tight. “Yeah. I know.”
They stopped walking, talking. Just stood together in the middle of the concrete path.
“Look, you can’t beat yourself up about that anymore.”
“But I brought Sylar to New York. I was so - ” Mohinder’s throat felt suddenly dry, voice faltering around his thoughts. He licked at his bottom lip in forethought, a habit he is unsure where he picked up and when. “I was so quick to try to avenge my father’s death that I allowed him to get loose in the city. To go after Peter Petrelli.”
He looked at the sky for a moment but it held no answers, no sympathy. “I gave him the opportunity to undo everything Peter was fighting to stop, because of my carelessness. And now I’m simply using Molly like everyone else has to try and make up for that mistake.”
“There’s nothing you could’ve done to change what happened to him,” and Matt suddenly just looked - and felt - tired. “We were all there. We know - ”
Mohinder shook his head, the rationalization not good enough. Not sound enough to his own ears to ease the tightness coiling in his chest. “I saw him die twice because of decisions I made,” he said, voice thinned, constricted, “If I had just -”
“ - He’s dead, and we’re not. And beating yourself up about it now won’t bring him back this time.”
The words are harsh but not unduly so; Mohinder knows this. They draw him up short like a slap, his mouth clicking shut again, drained of the fight. Matt sighs, because he has no answers for this, and Mohinder has no question to even ask. The change in roles is uncomforting in ways that it shouldn’t be, but Mohinder doesn’t mention it, only swallows down.
He doesn’t mention the message sitting on his machine at home, either, or the dream of dying stars; doesn’t want to ponder that yet, unsure of what it even means. So they don’t speak, just stand together in silence.
“Okay, look.” When Matt speaks again his voice softens around the edges as he reached into the inside pocket of his coat. “Bennet told me to give you this whenever I saw you. Says he knows a guy who knows about this stuff, so.” He produced a wide beige envelope, handing it to Mohinder. “Consider it like a late Chanukah gift or something.”
Mohinder examined it for a moment before pulling the seal open. “Coming from him, I think it’s intended to be a Christmas gift,” he said dryly, “and either way neither tradition applies to me.”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know what Hindus celebrate. So just open it.”
Papers slid out from the manila packet in a thick stack. Forged documents in his and Molly’s names: passports, adoption papers, counterfeit medical and financial histories. Legal records, authentic in appearance, all tracing six months earlier to confirm him as her sole guardian. For good.
Mohinder swallowed, and felt his chest swell. “I thought Bennet hated me.”
“I think he hates me half the time too,” Matt shrugged, “you get used to it after a while. And he knows you’re sticking your neck out for everybody on this - we all do.”
Mohinder could only nod distractedly, still studying the envelope in his hand as though to assure himself that its contents were still real. Glancing at his watch, Matt gestured towards him with a slight nod. “I gotta get going,” he said, “Tell Molly I said hi for me, okay?”
“When you see him,” and Mohinder turned to Matt as he walked away, “tell Bennet that her name is off the list now. I’ve purged his daughter from my father’s research, permanently.” It wasn’t ‘thank you,’ but the meaning behind it stood regardless. “No one will be able to use it to come for Claire again.”
Matt nodded, and knew immediately what the gesture meant, to both of the men. “I will.”
Watching the other man disappear, back to a life outside the stifling bubble of New York City, to Mohinder at least it felt a little like starting over.
--
To fingers fidgeting with the tension of confusion and fear and whatever else that tightly circled his thoughts, the weight of the black plastic receiver felt like a godsend. Physical memory moved his hand to punch in the only numbers that came to mind into the payphone’s tarnished nickel faceplate.
By the time he found the main road Peter had lost track of time, but it didn’t matter anyway. His watch had stopped, when and why he didn’t know; the thin metal arms were frozen in place, fixed on the numbers 8:49pm and the date, 11/8/06. The sun had started to settle behind the tops of the gangly looking trees that lined the embankment surrounding the stretch of highway marked Mile 146. The dry wind coming up the slope from the highway below had made his skin heat further, and licking at the corner of his mouth tasted the salt and dirt there, squinting through the glare of sunlight coming off the windows of passing cars.
He still wore the same blue tee, long-sleeved shirt and dark jeans. The clothes he’d remember putting on the morning he’d left his mother’s home with Claire, now clinging to his skin in a thin sheen of salt beneath the hazy burn of afternoon sunlight. It was too warm to be New York in late fall, Peter figured that out early on. But just where else he could’ve been - and how he could’ve gotten there - he still didn’t know.
Peter didn’t have to think as the connection to Nathan’s office line began to ring, dialing the number before he had a chance to consider it. He should’ve been there: should’ve gone back after Peter called him to meet in the parking garage downstairs, or at least that’s what he hoped. It made sense in his head, and that’s all that he had to work from.
Peter chewed his bottom lip with each tinny chime, biting into it until it nearly bled when the click never came. “No, no, no,” he argued with himself, striking the hammer out of abortive habit as though to will away whatever it was that blocked the line. In the back of his still swimming thoughts, somehow he knew it was worse than that.
He couldn’t call. He shouldn’t have called at all. In the hollow coil of his stomach he knew: he knew Nathan wasn’t going to do anything to stop it. Claire had been right; he couldn’t be trusted, he was going to let Peter explode. Let everyone else die, but - but he was alone now, and what was he supposed do? Nathan could help him; he loved him, he always came back for him before, at least when it counted.
He slammed the receiver down on the hook. Fished the last quarters from his pocket, dialed another number. Nathan’s home number. Surely someone could pick up, Nathan, Heidi, anyone. Tell him what was going on, what had happened.
The line clicked. “Hello?” His mother’s voice; sharp, curt. Peter let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding with a tight thin rasp. “Who is this?”
He could see her standing in his brother’s parlor with the telephone, images sliding into place like film stills behind his eye sockets. Dress immaculate and hair flawless, inimitable and alive as she had been when he saw her bend to kiss Charles Deveaux goodbye on the rooftop courtyard, when she spoke of allowing Peter to fall so that Nathan could rise instead. Let him fall -
“Peter, is - ”
His throat seized. The receiver slipped from his grasp and his feet moved him back from the payphone, feeling his head begin to spin and his stomach lurch in counterpoint. The sky above him burned holes in his vision like rice paper, and all he knew was that somehow, some way, he had to get back to the city.
TBC
Title: On the Other Side of Morning, 2/?
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Mohinder/Peter (eventually)
Spoilers: Everything leading up to 1x23
Summary: Life goes on for those left behind, and begins again for those thought lost.
Fast approaching monsters
Marching in a row;
Grab what slips your mind
And what your memory will not hold
-- Queens of the Stone Age, River in the Road
--
It was somewhat distressing to realize they had been living in the new apartment for nearly two weeks, and he’d still barely unpacked.
The datum spilled out across the top of his work desk, a thick stack of manila file folders with hastily scribbled names, dates and classification across the raised tabs in his own illegible chicken scratch. New specimen to be alphabetized, catalogued, recorded; new samples to be tested. Names and data to be added to the now fabled - and steadily growing - list.
Standing before his half-filled file shelf, Mohinder stared at the work before him, sighed, and carded a hand through his hair.
Sunshine filtered through the bedroom window in thin white slits of clean light. It defines the new map on the far left wall in narrow bands, highlighting the crisscross of colored twine and thumbtacks, metal pins catching in a tiny flourish of brass and daylight. His equipment sat below on the adjacent desk; in the boxes he’d remembered Molly carefully labeling science stuff in orange marker when she was helping him pack up the old apartment. It was still largely untouched, even after two weeks, the seal of clear tape across the cardboard flaps broken but its contents tucked safely inside.
Most of his things were still boxed up, for that matter. The remnants of life in the apartment in Brooklyn, and his last in Chennai, sent to New York after he’d called his mother and Nirand to arrange to have the last of his things shipped. His mother had not been utterly enthused, and understandably so, with the notion that her only son would be living in America permanently, but she understood his responsibilities, his obligations there. Beyond the research that claimed her husband before him; obligations to Molly, and others still as well.
And so his things had stayed. Discarded in columns of boxes in the bedroom and hallway, left in favor of unloading all of Molly’s things into her brightly painted bedroom across the hallway instead, arranging and rearranging furniture until she was contented. The fact that in the two months spent in his care Molly had somehow - although he knew very well the how, he just didn’t feel the need to admit that he had become biologically incapable saying “No” to an eight-year-old and meaning it - managed to acquire more possessions than Mohinder was certain he’d ever owned didn’t make this process any easier.
He sorted in silence. Samples, profiles, figures and notations; put away with their proper specimen dossiers. Divided into two stacks on the desktop, “processed” and “unprocessed.” Watching the latter column grow, Mohinder sighed again.
It wasn’t as though he didn’t have help. Molly insisted on doing what she could, whenever she could, as children often do. Sometimes she watched him work, reminding him when he’d been working too long - and he should probably eat, because he had to be hungry by now, sounding more like the parent than should have otherwise been allowed - as her small fingers skimmed along the cool wood of his chair back, data scrolling endlessly past the computer monitors in a language she didn’t understand.
Other times, when he was sufficiently distracted, she stole into his room to stand and stare at the map, frowning in concentration at the names written on post-it notes and photos fixed by pins attached to various localities. It made Mohinder nervous when he first saw her do this, watching her brow furrow as she stood on her tiptoes to pluck particular thumbtacks from their places and rearrange them how she saw, and knew, fit. Wanting to keep his work preserved as it stood, their world as he had come to understand it, but more so than that it was the still-fluttering need he felt to keep her as far removed from the list - and the dangers that came with it - as he could manage.
“This one’s here,” she chirped contentedly, and pointed to a thumbtack she placed over Atlanta. “And these,” two pins, from Hanover and Aberdeen to Budapest and Dundee, “they go here now.” And watching him stare dumbly at his adjusted map, she had only giggled.
The phone rang from its cradle on the bedside table at his back. Mohinder turned by degrees on the second electronic chime to eye it distractedly from over his shoulder. Didn’t step towards it, not yet, just waited for the machine to get it.
People rarely called the new apartment, because no one was really supposed to. He’d taken steps to ensure that. The address and number were unlisted; he’d given them to his mother and no else since moving in. The only phone number he had given out since was to his cellular, and strictly to his concise list of associates, contacts and the administrative offices at Molly’s elementary school, in case of emergency.
But as cautious as he had been, that didn’t mean that it still couldn’t be found if sought after long enough. And wanted badly enough.
The click of the machine, digital tape rolling. “Dr. Suresh.” Female voice, demure, unassuming, which as experience tells him, tends to be treacherous. “I’m contacting you at the request of an associate of the Petrelli family - ”
Turning he took two swift steps towards the machine. Questions and accusations fresh on the tip of his tongue, wanting to know the how and the why this person had found his number, when his cell phone went off on the desk behind him with a chirp and a rattle. Reached for it, “one new text message” blinking across the small display in a white menu window, and beneath it the name “Parkman.” Mohinder swallowed tightly, giving the answering machine a distrustful glance as he snapped his cellular shut again.
He would have to deal with that - whatever it was - later. He had an appointment to keep, after all.
--
Time passed, marked in the heat of sunlight passing over his skin.
How long he was unsure of, under the ringing in his ears and the hum of pained extremities still circling his brain. He felt…bruised, somehow, inside and outside. Skin sensitized, nerves twitching with a tired fire over each pull of joint, and in reply to every thread of cotton fiber rubbing against it from beneath his clothes. Sore, as though he’d been hurt from the fall - fall from what? shouldn’t he have healed? - but not the explosion. If the explosion had even happened yet, his recollection trapped beneath the fog.
None of the possibilities that ran along the wrinkles in his thoughts made any sense: falling, exploding, dying and not. The only thing he knew for sure was that there was nothing else here. No people, no dwellings, no roads or telephone lines. Only a flat expanse of short crinkly green pasture; grazing stock interspersing small patches of dirt and sun-browned grass and the sparse trees that crowded the small upgraded hills that enclosed the wide level prairie.
Tucking the wayward fringe of his bangs behind his ear, he got to his feet to face the dry wind. Staring up at the sky, his thoughts drifted towards flying: simply taking off from wherever this was, and going back to the city. To New York: to Claire, Nathan, to everyone.
But in what direction -- from what direction? How long would it take, and did anyone even know he’d gone?
Beyond the field was chicken-wire fence, grassland narrowing into a dirt road that ran a path between the trees for what looked like miles and miles. Where it could end he hadn’t the faintest clue, but it was what had made sense. It had to make sense.
Roads meant people, or at least Peter hoped they did.
--
“Hey.” A casual nod, hands in coat pockets, the exchanges of men who aren’t quite friends. “You look like hell.”
Snow settled on the outstretched arms of the barren trees that lined the horizon against the towering city, and on the ground in perfect, rolling sheets of soft and white. Back home it would’ve been mild, a little rainy perhaps but warm; nothing at all like a New England winter, with the wind and the ice and the snowflakes that stuck damply in his hair and to his clothes and never seemed to come out no matter how much he fussed with them. Mohinder’s fingers ached with the cold, the joints of gloved hands tense as he slid them into the pockets of his coat for warmth with a limp shrug and nod of his head.
“Hell is relative, I find. And there are always worse things to look like,” he replied, dry sort of smile edging at the corner of his mouth. “Matt.”
“Well I guess your sense of humor still works.”
The park is largely abandoned this time of day, in this kind of weather. The shovel-cleared jogging paths that intersected the white-blanketed ground were empty of activity and signs of use, save their tightly bundled forms as they walked along beside one other, soggy tracks left behind in freshly fallen powder. It was safer to meet out in the open, as they’d settled on some time ago, reassured if only by degrees. Phone lines could be tracked, buildings bugged, cars followed and private conversations overheard by eavesdroppers with the intent and the means to follow them. Here at least they had the illusion of privacy, for what it was still worth.
The last time Mohinder checked they were still considered wanted men, at least in some circles. Perhaps two months had been long enough to ease their guards but it wasn’t a risk he felt inclined to take anymore.
“Still off the reservation, I take it?” he asked, over the wet sound of boot heels tracking in muddy slush.
Matt shrugged. “Yeah, well, it’s amazing how fast the FBI warms up to you again when you get shot chasing serial killers that they can’t seem to find. Audrey says it’s like glorified consulting; not like an officially recognized job or anything, but at least somebody’s got a use for this, I guess.” He gestured towards his temple.
“That’s not what I meant, Parkman.” Something like humor, however perverse, sharpened in Mohinder’s eyes. “An unexplained explosion in a textiles factory on the Arizona-Mexico border? It made the news, you know; Molly followed the coverage for days.”
Matt gave him a sheepish sort of side-glance. “Yeah, well. What the FBI doesn’t know…”
Mohinder only nodded. He couldn’t say for sure that he wouldn’t put his own inward proclivity towards acts of vengeance to the same uses if he were in the other man’s position. And gods knew that Parkman and Bennet were certainy justified in doing so, out of all of them.
“Molly sends her regards,” he said instead. “She wanted to come with me but I told her skipping classes was out of the question, even under the circumstances. She wasn’t especially pleased about it, but…”
Of course she’d firmly reminded him that morning on the way to school to tell Parkman that she’d said hello. And that she was doing well, and she was sorry she couldn’t see him, and to tell him the ten other things that Mohinder hadn’t had a chance to make note of as she rattled them off excitedly in the passenger seat beside him.
“Sorry I won’t get a chance to stop by and say hi myself, I won’t be in the city that long this time,” Matt replied. “It’s not exactly a social visit.”
“Of course not.” Mohinder sighed, tightened gloved fingers as he watched the sunlight fade behind a rolling column of gray-edged clouds. From the inside pocket of his coat he produced the printed sheet of paper and passed it to the man at his side. “This is what she could establish of his whereabouts as of this morning,” he explained, as Matt examined the notations on the reproduced atlas print.
“Molly said she wasn’t able to get a lock on his location for the past several weeks; she believes he was moving too swiftly, perhaps in travel. These coordinates haven’t changed in the past twenty-four hours, so I believe he’s taken up root, at least for the moment. From what we’ve learned of the Taylor and Mendez murders, he tends to stay at the victims’ homes for a few days afterwards, but if you move quickly enough perhaps you can locate him before he moves on.”
Matt nodded pensively, as though memorizing the points of the printout in his hands. “This is good,” he replied, “this is really good. I’ll get this to Audrey tonight, see if she can get some people over there. Catch this bastard once and for all.”
Matt slid it into his coat pocket; Mohinder looked towards the city behind them with a tightness gathering in his stomach.
“This is wrong, Parkman, isn’t it?” Mohinder asked, out of his mouth before he had time to process the question for himself. “Molly is a child. She should be concerned with going to school, playing with dolls -- not helping you and I chase after murderers.”
Matt nodded, spared him a sympathetic look and casual nudge against the shoulder. Not quite friends, indeed, Mohinder surmised despite himself. “It’s not right, but we don’t get a choice about that. And you’re doing everything you can to help her, keep her safe - that’s something, man. She’s lucky to have you.”
The corners of his mouth tilted. “I think it’s me who’s been lucky to have her,” Mohinder replies, and doesn’t have to feign the look of warmth that takes his features. “After everything that’s happened, I don’t think I would know what to do without her now…”
He dropped his eyes to the ground, fondness slipping from his expression. “It’s been on the news again you know.”
A sigh, thin, tight. “Yeah. I know.”
They stopped walking, talking. Just stood together in the middle of the concrete path.
“Look, you can’t beat yourself up about that anymore.”
“But I brought Sylar to New York. I was so - ” Mohinder’s throat felt suddenly dry, voice faltering around his thoughts. He licked at his bottom lip in forethought, a habit he is unsure where he picked up and when. “I was so quick to try to avenge my father’s death that I allowed him to get loose in the city. To go after Peter Petrelli.”
He looked at the sky for a moment but it held no answers, no sympathy. “I gave him the opportunity to undo everything Peter was fighting to stop, because of my carelessness. And now I’m simply using Molly like everyone else has to try and make up for that mistake.”
“There’s nothing you could’ve done to change what happened to him,” and Matt suddenly just looked - and felt - tired. “We were all there. We know - ”
Mohinder shook his head, the rationalization not good enough. Not sound enough to his own ears to ease the tightness coiling in his chest. “I saw him die twice because of decisions I made,” he said, voice thinned, constricted, “If I had just -”
“ - He’s dead, and we’re not. And beating yourself up about it now won’t bring him back this time.”
The words are harsh but not unduly so; Mohinder knows this. They draw him up short like a slap, his mouth clicking shut again, drained of the fight. Matt sighs, because he has no answers for this, and Mohinder has no question to even ask. The change in roles is uncomforting in ways that it shouldn’t be, but Mohinder doesn’t mention it, only swallows down.
He doesn’t mention the message sitting on his machine at home, either, or the dream of dying stars; doesn’t want to ponder that yet, unsure of what it even means. So they don’t speak, just stand together in silence.
“Okay, look.” When Matt speaks again his voice softens around the edges as he reached into the inside pocket of his coat. “Bennet told me to give you this whenever I saw you. Says he knows a guy who knows about this stuff, so.” He produced a wide beige envelope, handing it to Mohinder. “Consider it like a late Chanukah gift or something.”
Mohinder examined it for a moment before pulling the seal open. “Coming from him, I think it’s intended to be a Christmas gift,” he said dryly, “and either way neither tradition applies to me.”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know what Hindus celebrate. So just open it.”
Papers slid out from the manila packet in a thick stack. Forged documents in his and Molly’s names: passports, adoption papers, counterfeit medical and financial histories. Legal records, authentic in appearance, all tracing six months earlier to confirm him as her sole guardian. For good.
Mohinder swallowed, and felt his chest swell. “I thought Bennet hated me.”
“I think he hates me half the time too,” Matt shrugged, “you get used to it after a while. And he knows you’re sticking your neck out for everybody on this - we all do.”
Mohinder could only nod distractedly, still studying the envelope in his hand as though to assure himself that its contents were still real. Glancing at his watch, Matt gestured towards him with a slight nod. “I gotta get going,” he said, “Tell Molly I said hi for me, okay?”
“When you see him,” and Mohinder turned to Matt as he walked away, “tell Bennet that her name is off the list now. I’ve purged his daughter from my father’s research, permanently.” It wasn’t ‘thank you,’ but the meaning behind it stood regardless. “No one will be able to use it to come for Claire again.”
Matt nodded, and knew immediately what the gesture meant, to both of the men. “I will.”
Watching the other man disappear, back to a life outside the stifling bubble of New York City, to Mohinder at least it felt a little like starting over.
--
To fingers fidgeting with the tension of confusion and fear and whatever else that tightly circled his thoughts, the weight of the black plastic receiver felt like a godsend. Physical memory moved his hand to punch in the only numbers that came to mind into the payphone’s tarnished nickel faceplate.
By the time he found the main road Peter had lost track of time, but it didn’t matter anyway. His watch had stopped, when and why he didn’t know; the thin metal arms were frozen in place, fixed on the numbers 8:49pm and the date, 11/8/06. The sun had started to settle behind the tops of the gangly looking trees that lined the embankment surrounding the stretch of highway marked Mile 146. The dry wind coming up the slope from the highway below had made his skin heat further, and licking at the corner of his mouth tasted the salt and dirt there, squinting through the glare of sunlight coming off the windows of passing cars.
He still wore the same blue tee, long-sleeved shirt and dark jeans. The clothes he’d remember putting on the morning he’d left his mother’s home with Claire, now clinging to his skin in a thin sheen of salt beneath the hazy burn of afternoon sunlight. It was too warm to be New York in late fall, Peter figured that out early on. But just where else he could’ve been - and how he could’ve gotten there - he still didn’t know.
Peter didn’t have to think as the connection to Nathan’s office line began to ring, dialing the number before he had a chance to consider it. He should’ve been there: should’ve gone back after Peter called him to meet in the parking garage downstairs, or at least that’s what he hoped. It made sense in his head, and that’s all that he had to work from.
Peter chewed his bottom lip with each tinny chime, biting into it until it nearly bled when the click never came. “No, no, no,” he argued with himself, striking the hammer out of abortive habit as though to will away whatever it was that blocked the line. In the back of his still swimming thoughts, somehow he knew it was worse than that.
He couldn’t call. He shouldn’t have called at all. In the hollow coil of his stomach he knew: he knew Nathan wasn’t going to do anything to stop it. Claire had been right; he couldn’t be trusted, he was going to let Peter explode. Let everyone else die, but - but he was alone now, and what was he supposed do? Nathan could help him; he loved him, he always came back for him before, at least when it counted.
He slammed the receiver down on the hook. Fished the last quarters from his pocket, dialed another number. Nathan’s home number. Surely someone could pick up, Nathan, Heidi, anyone. Tell him what was going on, what had happened.
The line clicked. “Hello?” His mother’s voice; sharp, curt. Peter let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding with a tight thin rasp. “Who is this?”
He could see her standing in his brother’s parlor with the telephone, images sliding into place like film stills behind his eye sockets. Dress immaculate and hair flawless, inimitable and alive as she had been when he saw her bend to kiss Charles Deveaux goodbye on the rooftop courtyard, when she spoke of allowing Peter to fall so that Nathan could rise instead. Let him fall -
“Peter, is - ”
His throat seized. The receiver slipped from his grasp and his feet moved him back from the payphone, feeling his head begin to spin and his stomach lurch in counterpoint. The sky above him burned holes in his vision like rice paper, and all he knew was that somehow, some way, he had to get back to the city.
TBC